OS X 10.9 Mavericks: The Ars Technica Review

No longer an apex predator, OS X takes some time for introspection.

Notification Center

Notification Center has become such an integral part of my daily use of OS X that I just spent a few moments searching my review of Lion for the word “notification” before realizing that Notification Center was actually introduced just a year ago in Mountain Lion. I’d say the feature has handily earned its place in the upper-right corner of the screen, even if most of my interaction with it is through the preference pane and the various alerts and banners that appear during the day.

Mavericks takes the obvious next step and adds the ability to reply to a notification right from the alert itself. This only works for a handful of Apple-supported applications right now (e.g., instant messages using the Messages application, e-mail using Apple’s Mail application) but the supported services have broad coverage: Facebook, Twitter, FaceTime, e-mail, instant message, calendar events, and reminders.

Simple, text-only replies can be sent directly from a notification alert using an inline user interface.

Replying to an instant message from within the notification.

The reply button on e-mail notification alerts will launch the Mail application and prepare a reply. Despite the potential sophistication of an e-mail message (attachments, styled text, and so on), an inline e-mail reply interface would be a nice option. Maybe next year.

Cross-protocol replies are a pleasant surprise. An invitation to a FaceTime video chat offers an inline instant-message reply option with a configurable set of canned answers (or freeform text), plus an option to add a reminder to get back to the person later. The reminder will include a link to initiate a FaceTime chat with the person.

FaceTime requests can be replied to with an instant message or by creating a reminder to contact the person later.

Instant messages can also be initiated from that weird little area at the top of the Notification Center sidebar. It’s getting pretty crowded up there. There’s probably room for one more service icon before things start getting silly.

Send an instant message, tweet, or share something on Facebook or LinkedIn from the top of Notification Center.

Sending an instant message from Notification Center.

Each type of notification now has an option (on by default) to display even when the screen is locked. Notifications that may contain sensitive information, such as e-mails or instant messages, have an additional option to show message previews only when the screen is unlocked (the default), or always.

New privacy-related notification preferences.

These defaults are reasonable, but people who rely on screen savers for “casual” privacy in shared spaces may not want even the names of the people who are e-mailing and instant-messaging them to appear on their unattended screens. As always, the price of Notification Center satisfaction is eternal vigilance.

Though Safari in Mountain Lion linked Web notifications to OS X’s native notification system, I’ve encountered few websites that take advantage of this feature. It only works when a website is open in a Safari window, so admittedly, its usefulness is limited.

Finally, the big on/off switch at the top of the Notification Center sidebar has been rebranded as Do Not Disturb and has been given a generous helping of preferences.

Notification Center’s Do Not Disturb feature now has a full set of preferences.

The part of me that Apple’s beautiful, terrible walled garden has not yet stamped out of existence still yearns for a more open notification system that would allow third-party applications to enjoy the same interface integration as Apple’s “blessed” applications for each service. (I use Adium for instant messaging, Twitterrific for Twitter, and Gmail for e-mail.) But overall, the notification system in Mavericks is a comfortable improvement over its initial incarnation in Mountain Lion.

John Siracusa / John Siracusa has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Boston University. He has been a Mac user since 1984, a Unix geek since 1993, and is a professional web developer and freelance technology writer.